In the past, a wide variety of portable shelters have been used. These include tents and similar structures, as well as inflatable structures, geodesic domes and various types of prefabricated shelters. Tents have the advantages of being inexpensive, quickly erectable, portable, and generally lightweight. They are generally easily assembled, disassembled and stored when disassembled. In short, tents and portable structures of varying designs have many uses. The present disclosure is suitable for a wide variety of recreational, military and business uses whenever a sturdy, yet quickly erectable portable shelter is needed.
It is often advantageous to join or connect two or more shelters to each other or to separate them from one another as may be necessary to accomplish a particular task. A common way to join fabric shelters or tarps is to use becket lace (a short loop of rope with a knot at one end) and grommets. A traditional becket lace fastening system or connector construction has lace located on one side edge of the fabric material covering a shelter and grommets located on the other side edge of the material. However, some designs only have lace on both side edges of a strip of shelter or tarp material and beckets only on the side edges of another strip of material of the shelter or tarp meant to be connected to the first strip. If two shelters only have lace or only have beckets, the connection cannot be made. Another difficulty with becket lace-type arrangements is that at the end of the becket lace, the last two loops are knotted so that the lace cannot be pulled apart. However, often times, someone assembling such a shelter will let go of one of the loops and the whole section unlaces due to the weight of the fabric pulling on the lace. Becket lace connector constructions are also personnel intensive and require a significant amount of time to accomplish.
Other methods of connecting segments of a shelter fabric material include zippers and standard hook and loop (VELCRO®) fasteners or fastening elements. However, zippers can be difficult to start. Also, it is difficult to fasten a zipper connection on adjacent panels of the fabric so that the panels stay aligned. Zippers also break easily. A difficulty with conventional hook and loop fasteners is that a single connection joint can be pulled apart easily. Moreover, hook and loop fasteners require that the correct mating sections be installed on each panel side edge, i.e., a strip of hook material or a strip of loop material. But, since hook material does not connect to hook material, and loop material does not connect to loop material, one side edge of the shelter fabric needs to have a strip of hook material and the other side edge needs to have a strip of loop material. If one side edge of a shelter has hooks on its side edge, then the mating shelter would need to have loops on the edge which is meant to be secured thereto, and vice versa.
However, this requires the two shelters to be built differently and arranged in a particular order, both of which requirements are highly undesirable. To make them the same, one would need to manufacture all the shelter segments so that one side edge would have hook connectors and the other side edge would have loop connectors. But, if this is done, the user has to take care to set up the shelters for ready connection. If loops are facing loops or hooks are facing hooks, the shelter would need to be rotated 180° to align it with an end edge of an adjacent tent. Because shelters can be difficult to set up, rotating them to adjust their alignment with each other is problematic. For example, some of these tents, such as tents used by the military as well as by emergency response teams, weigh over 700 pounds each. Rotating a 700 pound tent is difficult, time consuming and requires multiple personnel. Moving such tents can also lead to damage when done by the untrained.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a shelter interengagement system or connector assembly which is universal so that any shelter can be secured to any other shelter, whether the open sidewalls of two shelters are connected to each other or via interconnected doorways of the two shelters. It would also be desirable to provide a connector assembly that is easy to use, is sturdy and requires a minimum number of personnel to use. Further, it would be desirable to provide a connector assembly that can be employed to connect any desired number of shelters to each other.